59 quotes
The interpretation of metaphors shifts from the univocality of catachreses to the open possibilities offered by inventive metaphors.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
The Name of the Rose (1980)
Affected as they are by a constitutive solipsism, philosophies can say everything about the world they design and very little about the world they help to construct.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Scholem … says that Jewish mystics have always tried to project their own thought into the biblical texts; as a matter of fact, every unexpressible reading of a symbolic machinery depends on such a projective attitude.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Good or bad are theoretical stipulations according to which, by a philosophical decision, many scattered instances of the most different facts or acts become the same thing.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past. As I learned later from the delightful little book of the Abbé de Bucquoy, there are also visions of books as yet unwritten.
The Name of the Rose (1980)
The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.
Ur-Fascism (1995)
I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.
Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes.
Ur-Fascism (1995)
Signs are not empirical objects. Empirical objects become signs (or they are looked at as signs) only from the point of view of a philosophical decision.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
Philosophies can be judged, at most, on the grounds of the perspicacity with which they decide that something is worthy of becoming the starting point for a global explanatory hypothesis.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
For the Kabalist, the fact that God expresses Himself, even though His utterances are beyond any human insight, is more important than any specific and coded meaning His words can convey.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
A map is not the territory. - Alfred Korzybski
A general semiotics studies the whole of the human signifying activity — languages — and languages are what constitutes human beings as such, that is, as semiotic animals. It studies and describes languages through languages.
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984)
However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
Ur-Fascism (1995)
I don't even have an E-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.
Our duty is to uncover it and point the finger at any of its new instances — every day and in every part of the world.
Ur-Fascism (1995)
I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism.
Ur-Fascism (1995)
The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.
The Name of the Rose (1980)
At the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.
Ur-Fascism (1995)